Computer systems include a plurality of physical resources that consume electrical power.
A computer system may include a system-wide power-save feature to place all or substantially all physical resources, including an instruction processor, in a reduced-power or sleep state.
During normal operation, a computer system may utilize one or more physical resources when performing a task, during which one or more other physical resources may not be utilized. For example, a data transfer between a storage device and a network may utilize the storage device and a network interface card, but may not utilize other physical resources, such as a display, a printer, a keyboard, and other physical resources.
Where a computer task may take a relatively long period of time to complete, such a as a relatively large data transfer, or where the task may be performed when the computer is not needed for other purposes, maintaining non-utilized physical resources in active states unnecessarily consumes power.
In the drawings, the leftmost digit(s) of a reference number identifies the drawing in which the reference number first appears.